Token

by Barbara Anderson

My mother keeps an artificial wallet
in her pocketbook to fool the hoodlums of the city.
Thick with newspaper torn into money,
it is the wallet not chained
to the inner security zipper.
FUCK YOU it says on the transparent plastic folder
for credit cards and photos of loved ones.
FUCK YOU on the window for identification.
In case of emergency, she carries it everywhere
invisibly as the belief in god
or knowledge of karate. Any god can tell you this,
she knows, that everything she’s ever saved
is just so much dinero in the sky,
small change to the sun.
But to ride the subways in the heavy metallic hour
before the rush, as the train burrows
from one man-made darkness into another,
between fluorescent stations
yellowed to the color of the moon—
everyone needs something besides
themselves to conceal for ransom.

I don’t know why I never thought to get her to autograph my copy of Junk City.

The Coat
by Barbara Anderson

The first time I noticed the blue
on the white snow was the day
my mother found a twenty dollar bill
on the way to the subway
and cautioned me to walk always
with my head to the ground
if I ever expected to find anything
in this world for free.
It was the first day my bather wore
the enormous brown overcoat,
all he had left of his dead brother,
the coat I was afraid of
because I believed my father
walked everywhere like a ventriloquist
wisecracking to his fat unfunny brother
like they always had
on Sundays around the kitchen table
while my mother basted the chicken
or peeled the potatoes.
It was New Year’s day, 1961,
the upside down year I turned over
& over again on the cover of Mad Magazine
while my father got drunk
on the subway and joked & cried
for his brother who he would
never seen again, not for Auld Lang Syne,
not for all the coming emptiness
of 1961 which turns over & over
like my uncle’s inscrutable riddle
about the weight of gold or feathers
that I had to answer
before he’d give me a silver dollar
or a chocolate kiss.
On the first day of 1961
my father cried on the subway
as my mother took the whole family
to see Natalie Wood & Warren Beatty
fall in love in a small town in Kansas
in a time my mother said she could remember,
the brief good years before the Depression.
She was my age then, thirteen.
On January 1, 1961, it was so cold
on the balcony of the Loews Valencia
my mother allowed my father
to give me a sip of the brown liquor
and then another & another
as Natalie Wood ran hysterical,
from a classroom, after losing her first love
and reading a passage
from Intimations of Immortality,
words about loss and strength
I memorized as the theatre went dark again
and we all rode home a little drunk
& silent in the artificial midnight
lighting of the IRT where I wrote my first poem
and my mother counted her change like feathers or gold
and my father fell asleep on her shoulder
snoring with his ghostly brown coat wrapped around them.